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Copilot Studio flow question: true calendar month vs last 31 days

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Posted on by JC-13021548-0

4

Hi everyone, I’m building a Copilot Studio flow to automate our monthly newsletter.

Current setup

The flow runs once a month
It pulls messages from a Teams channel
Right now, the time filter uses something like:
```
addDays(utcNow(), -31)
```
This means it’s pulling the last 31 days, not the actual calendar month

What I’m trying to solve I want the flow to:

Pull data from the true previous calendar month
(e.g., Jan 1–Jan 31, Feb 1–Feb 28)
Still run automatically on a monthly schedule
Work cleanly across different month lengths

Question What’s the best way to implement true monthly date logic in Copilot Studio / Power Automate?

Is there a recommended expression pattern for start/end of last month?
Or a best practice when filtering Teams messages by calendar month?

Any examples or guidance would be much appreciated. thank you!

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David_MA 14,956 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I am not sure I fully understand what you are doing, but I think I know how you can achieve what you want. If you're using a filter query, and you want to get the items for the prior month. Use these two expressions in your filter query:

subtractFromTime(startOfMonth(utcNow()), 1, 'Month')

startOfMonth(utcNow())

The first expression gets the first day of the prior month (2026-01-01) and the second expression gets the first date of the current month (2026-02-01). Then you just need to filter query where your date field is greater than or equal to the first and expression and your date field is less than the second expression.

Note: this assumes your flow runs in the month following the month you want to get items from. If the flow runs in the same month, then you can just use the second expression.

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chiaraalina 2,425 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @JC-13021548-0

Please see first answer. Didn't see the answer before as I had the question open for too long.

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David_MA 14,956 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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That is the same answer I posted. 🤣

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